Remembering Nancy Hiller

Clive Wilmer pays tribute to Companion Nancy Hiller, who died in September 2022.

Nancy Hiller (1959-2022)

A Guild newsletter last autumn reported the death in September 2022 of Companion Nancy Hiller. She had been struggling with pancreatic cancer for more than two years. 

Born in 1959, Nancy was a cabinetmaker, furniture maker and author.  Her home was in Bloomington, Indiana, where she ran her own company, NR Hiller Design: Custom Furniture and Cabinetry, and taught woodworking classes. I know her work only from photographs and by report, but it was clearly very beautiful,  and the beauty resided in its simplicity and functionality. Consciously made in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, it owed, as that whole movement did, a great deal to Ruskin’s thought. This was not only a matter of aesthetics. Nancy was a radical egalitarian and, though her pieces were not cheap, she did all that she could to make them affordable to anyone of moderate income. 

Her sensitivity, as an artist and a person in business, to questions of social and economic justice was among the many and various things that drew her to Ruskin.  This was clear from her books on furniture-making. She wrote both how-to-do guides to cabinet-making and histories of Arts and Crafts furniture in Britain (where she spent much of her childhood and youth). But perhaps the best of her books combine both sorts of writing. These notably include Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life (2017) and English Arts and Crafts Furniture (2018). 

I met Nancy on only two occasions, but I felt from the outset that we were friends. She wrote to me when she was finishing English Arts and Crafts Furniture, asking for critical advice on her account of Ruskin’s influence. That first message led to a fascinating email conversation and then, in March 2019, a visit from her and her husband Mark when they were travelling in Britain. Partly as a result of that meeting, she applied to become a Companion. (She wrote a memorable letter of application, which I append to this tribute.) The following year, a month before the first lockdown, she drove over to Notre Dame University, Indiana, to hear me give the Ruskin Birthday Lecture at the conference John Ruskin: Prophet of the Anthropocene. It was wonderful to see her and talk to her face to face again, but very soon afterwards she wrote to say she was seriously ill. She knew very well that fighting off pancreatic cancer was going to be a challenge, but I hoped against hope that she would succeed. She did not, and we have lost a remarkable craftsperson and Companion before her time.

Clive Wilmer

Letter of application for Companionship of the Guild of St George (2019)

Dear Guild of St. George,

I am applying to be a Companion in the Guild as a way of partnering with others who work to promote the values and perspectives that Ruskin exemplified and championed in his works. Among these I would especially include the following:

• Respect for nature and thoughtful consideration of how we live in relation to the natural world, on which our being is utterly dependent
• Understanding the idea of investment in terms that go beyond the usual financial considerations
• The importance of seeing—seeing each other, seeing ourselves, seeing each other’s work
• Treating others with kindness and fairness; reading and listening charitably, with an effort to understand the other 
• Lifelong learning. Honing our skills. Challenging ourselves to do our best—while at the same time not just accepting, but seeing the value in, our work’s imperfection.
• Living fully and helping others to do the same
• Having the courage to express and argue on behalf of our strongly held ethical positions in the face of political, social, or economic power

These values have informed my thinking and writing (and, it should go without saying, my living) for years. Without any formal connection to Ruskin’s legacy I have worked to champion them. 

For as long as I can remember I have understood artifacts as embodying the values of those who design and make them, as well as influencing the perspective of those who use them. I was fortunate to have a chance to read extensively on these and related subjects when I returned to university at the age of 30. That was where I first encountered Ruskin’s writing in Unto This Last and Other Writings. “The Nature of Gothic” was a revelation; Ruskin put into words so much of what I had sensed inchoately. At the time I also read Clive Wilmer’s introduction to that volume, which made a deep impression and left me wishing that I could meet Clive someday; he helped me make that dream come true this past March. 

After earning a master’s degree in religious studies with a focus on ethics I returned to my earlier profession as a maker of custom furniture and cabinetry but never stopped reading and writing. As part of my effort to help make the world a better place, I began submitting my work for publication in the hope that it might encourage others to see everyday matters in richer ways. In 2003 I had my first essay, “Money Well Spent” http://nrhillerdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/09-03.pdf, published in a national periodical, Old-House Interiors (which merged with Old-House Journal several years ago as a result of the Great Recession). Since then, I have had several essays published in these and other periodicals; among them is “Wedded to Place” http://nrhillerdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/interiors_11_05.pdf, which looks at the ideas of property and investment in far deeper terms than those that dominate the marketplace.

As a woodworker who lived in England from the ages of 12 to 28 and went through a basic City & Guilds furniture training, I have had a special interest in Arts and Crafts design. When a publisher of woodworking books invited me to submit a proposal for one on English Arts and Crafts furniture, I told her I would only consider doing so if the book could include a substantial and serious treatment of the philosophy that underlies what we refer to as Arts and Crafts furniture, a body of work so diverse that it defies identification as a style on any kind of simple visual grounds (at least, if one is paying attention instead of just blindly accepting prevailing views). For me, that meant using Ruskin’s elaboration of Gothic virtues as a basic organizing principle. Since the book was published in the spring of 2018 I have given several related presentations, most notably a pair at Fine Woodworking magazine’s annual national event. It is always a thrill to introduce people to Ruskin’s thinking and provide a perspective on the Arts and Crafts movement that’s shockingly unfamiliar to most.

Ruskin’s ideas about society, economics, work, nature, and so much else are as important today as they have ever been. I believe that as someone with a foot in two worlds—furniture making and (at least tangentially) academe—I am well positioned to help ignite interest in Ruskin’s work and show its relevance to contemporary life. Regardless of whether I am accepted as a Companion of the Guild, I will continue to speak and write about Ruskin’s conception of Gothic because it is fascinating and instructive, and I love seeing people’s eyes light up with wonder in response.

Thank you for considering my application.

Sincerely,

Nancy R. Hiller